So on a total whim I am auditioning for a local symphony at the end of next month. I don't genuinely think I'm actually going to get in, but preparing for the audition has forced me to practice for like 2+ hours every day to get my finger strength and dexterity and control back, and the orchestral excerpts for the audition are very technically challenging.

My phrasing is awful and my tone is pretty garbage here too but this is a super hard Beethoven passage and I'm honestly proud I was able to actually play it lmao:

I'll probably be posting sporadic updates as I get better at performing the excerpts. May not have time to actually work on original music until after the audition, but it's nice to actually be motivated to improve at my instrument. I've never practiced this hard in my life actually lol so we'll see where my skills are at in a month

That's pretty neat. I'd have liked to play an instrument but I have Fry's stupid fingers.

i have tiny hands and tiny fingers which is unfortunate for some extensions but what matters way more than that is finger strength and dexterity... which came from being one of those kids whose parents paid for lessons from like age 6. >__>

that said never too late to start PLUS theres free youtube lessons for everything now

OK, don't tell anyone BUT I had a big brain idea the other week and I think after this audition my next cello goal is I am going to prep a setlist of Tales songs and arrange them for solo cello performance and request to play them at Aselia con! I've started working on a few songs but I'm still just mainly focusing on these audition excerpts.

The good news is I've been improving a lot. This excerpt is super hard but I can, like, sorta play it now so that's something:

EDIT: for some reason i learned the high note in the main arpeggio as an e flat instead of a g. it is definitely supposed to be a g. rip. time to re-learn te fingering for that lolololol

I have 2 excerpts left to learn. They're getting progressively more difficult, which is actually great because as I struggle through the later harder ones it makes going back to the previous ones feel like a cakewalk. Once I've learned all the excerpts and am in the process of polishing them all I'll post more, but in the meantime here's me fumbling through one of Prokofiev's stupidly fast passages

I haven't updated this topic in a while. I haven't made any composition progress lately but I have been trying to find time to practice in the evenings after work and on weekends when I'm not going fast. Being an adult etc etc. Anyway, I recorded this because I just found an old recording of me playing this song from like 2011, and while that performance was good I play it really differently now. I think this is the best I've ever performed it, actually.

So this weekend is yet again the global game jam. I'm still in the midst of making **** but right now I'm actually really excited about the intro portion of one of the songs I'm composing, so posting private link here:

it's kind of cool when every now and then you make something that surprises even yourself. i'm stoked about how this will sound when it's finished. like nothing about this is groundbreaking, yet i'm happy because i really nailed the vibe i wanted to go for which does NOT always happen lol

the structure is (loop) (transition) (loop) (transition) (loop); it starts out as a kind of desolate underater wasteland and you rebuild it and it gets more lively, so i tried to represent that. i could have made this file continuous but i decided to actually keep it true to how it would sound in-game, as 5 sequential copied-and-pasted sound files; so you can still hear the transitions a bit but I'm pretty proud of how well I managed to hide them considering I did it very very jank

edit: also i kind of just gave up entirely for the transition to the last part. iwas just like. whatever, yolo, it's just faster now deal with it

edit edit: will post more info on the game itself once it's done i just wanted to post this bc i finished it and am proud

Our team consisted of me and 2 friends who do this every year, but usually we also have other people on the team. Not this year. It was me (music), my friend (art/modeling), and my other friend (programming). Which actually made for a super chill experience, we each had our own lane of work to do.

Unfortunately, our programmer wanted to use a trial extension from Google that lets you generate a map from their Maps data and use it as a basis, and he had gotten over a day into building this before realizing that it wouldn't work on anything except the editor. So at about midnight last night we had to just scrap that and build a new map from scratch. Our artist churned out a bunch of modular assets and I was given the task of turning them into a city landscape. I am not a landscape architect, and moreover I was really tired and had spent like 24+ hours composing music, so if you're wondering why nothing is to scale and it looks kind of like a disaster, that's why. I did my best.

Anyway it was fun. The theme was "repair" so we went for repairing a destroyed city. We actually kept the transitional music tracks in the game, but because there is a frame where it checks for whether to loop or proceed, the loop that sounds perfect when listened to in a music player has a kind of obvious break in it. But that's okay, we tried.

It has sharks in it as a remnant of an earlier idea that was scrapped. Sharks are cute so we kept them. We sort of wanted this to be an underwater city but honestly that became secondary when we had to throw a bunch of stuff off the table and try to make this workable.

We'd intended to make it a sort of upgradey/resource management thing but that didn't end up happening in the time we had.

I really like how the menu blip sound effect came out. The other ones are alright but that one came out really nice.

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EDIT:

this is a screenshot from building the landscape

this is how it looks in the game partially rebuilt

(to clarify I did none of the modeling I just kind of placed stuff on a grid because it was busywork the others didn't have time for and I had finished composing)

I'm working on an arrangement for vocals, piano, and cello. It's an anime song because of who I am as a person. The vocals are soprano/alto duet, so the harmonization has actually been pretty fun because there is already harmony with the 2 melodies and bassline, but because of me being me I decided to have some fun with how to set that to chords. Spoilers, lots of 7th chords.

I don't wanna spoil the whole arrangement until I get the soprano vocalist's part back and start putting it together, bc I think it's gonna sound really frickin rad with both voice parts and cello. but I **** up my wrists today trying to get this piano take, and I finally did get this piano take, so here it is. I'm eventually gonna capture it via better means but for now this is just audio ripped from a crappy phone recording.

I'll probably re-record my vocal part after I get the soprano track bc I'll want to match her phrasing, and I definitely need to re-record the piano (just waiting on a cord for that one); but I'm enjoying how this is coming along. Will definitely add a cello bassline and maybe more texture but that has to wait until I finish my mandated wrist rest period after making them mad this weekend.

I will also do less crappy mixing when I have more parts, but for right now je suis lazy so ceci is what you get.